Businesses @ Work

Bulls, bears and everything in between

Bulls: Office 365 increased its lead as the most popular app in our network in 2016. Office 365 is also the number one lifecycle management app today (but Box and G Suite are not far behind). And, Office 365 is far and away the most popular app accessed by Okta customers on mobile devices.

Bears: Based on our data, no two apps have been more impacted by Slack's success than Yammer and HipChat. Both have continued to steadily decline in popularity throughout 2016. Microsoft even announced plans to discontinue selling Yammer as a standalone product in 2017, and is attempting to reinvent itself in this space with the introduction of Microsoft Teams.

In Between: Video and web conferencing platform, Zoom, is zooming to the top! The app was the fastest growing app in the past six months. It wasn't even in the top 25 in our last report! Zoom grew 67% in the past six months, followed by Cisco Umbrella, which grew 47%. Slack came in third with 44% growth, an impressive feat after holding the "Fastest Growing App" title for the past two reports.

It's not just business, it's personal

We've always known that Okta is used for personal apps and services, but we were surprised by the extent of it. More than 50% of apps that are accessed via Okta are not provided by IT 1. This means people are using Okta to secure more than just corporate apps and data—the Okta Identity Cloud is also keeping personal data secure. As the lines blur between work and personal lives, businesses clearly understand the importance of securing employee access to all apps. And security isn't the only reason businesses are allowing end users to add apps themselves. Joe Turbett, Senior Director of Global Operations and Infrastructure at McGraw Hill shared, "We have a newer, kinder, gentler IT where we're trying to encourage and be flexible with our employees' ability to be productive. I need them to be productive in everything they do."

1. Personal apps defined as those added to the Okta dashboard by an individual, not by IT.

G Suite customers: in a league of their own

We discovered that G Suite customers use 30% more apps on average than Office 365 customers (29 apps compared to 22). More isn't always better, but it certainly can be. Our data shows G Suite customers are employing a best-of-breed IT strategy to build out their cloud ecosystem. G Suite customers are more likely to use apps like Salesforce, Slack, Amazon Web Services and GitHub than their Office 365-subscribed counterparts. They're adopting apps to meet specific needs versus investing in an entire cloud app stack up front.

Are we united or are we divided?

We know our country is more politically divided than ever before. But, with the upcoming inauguration, we were curious: how do blue, red and swing states differ with respect to app usage? While the data was less polarizing than the 2016 presidential election, there were some interesting findings. We discovered that blue states, on average, use more apps (22) than both red (18.5) and swing (18) states. And, customers in blue states tend to be more cloud-forward than their red and swing state counterparts, with higher adoption of 12 out of the top 15 most popular apps, including Box, ADP, G Suite, JIRA, Slack and Zendesk (among others).

With external identities comes great responsibility

In our 2016 Businesses @ Work report, we shared that the number of external identities (partners, customers and suppliers) in Okta's network had surpassed the number internal identities for the first time. The number of external identities continues to increase. External identities grew 294% and 540% in 2015 and 2016 respectively. It's clear that technology is playing a bigger role than ever before as nearly every company thinks about how they become a technology company in their own right. Our data tells us that the responsibility for these initiatives is falling at least in part on the CIO. The digital transformation is happening —and it's sitting on IT's desk! IT doesn't just manage employees anymore, they manage entire ecosystems of employees, customers, partners and distributors.

SMBs explore an AD alternative

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) has been the defacto standard directory in the working world for more than a decade. 95% of the Fortune 1000 use Active Directory today (source). But, as nearly every business system moves (or has moved already) to the cloud, it raises the question: will enterprises continue to use an on-premises directory? Maybe not. Roughly 16% of customers in our network don't use AD or LDAP today, a slight increase from 2 years ago. And more than 30% of SMB customers in the Okta Identity Cloud don't use AD or LDAP. As these companies grow and mature, they may never deploy a traditional on-premises directory, an indicator that usage in large organizations may decline.

A new breed of unicorns

It seems like the reputation of private software companies hinges too much on whether or not they have achieved "unicorn status", and not enough on things that actually matter, like adoption or utilization within the enterprise. So, we took it upon ourselves to redefine what a unicorn is. We identified the 10 most popular private enterprise software companies based on the number of customers using these apps. Slack, not surprisingly, is number one, followed by Dropbox, DocuSign, GitHub, and Smartsheet. Check out our full list of unicorns below.